# Jermaine Bryant ![A professional headshot of Junior Fellow Jermaine Bryant](/sites/g/files/omnuum12196/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-10/Bryant.jpg?h=eac83491&itok=gyZbebVX) email Classics and African Studies B.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University Photo courtesy of Mark James Dunn I like thinking about methods. In particular, I like thinking about the way theory (broadly defined), political history, and literary criticism intersect in approaches to the ancient world, especially when it comes to things that are considered painful, destructive, or ugly. At Harvard I am exploring this interest with two major topics, each with a monograph project: the reconstitution of Roman society after the civil wars of the first century BC, and the Black ethnographers of antiquity leading up to and during the decolonial movements of the 20th century. The first monograph is a study of mental and emotional wounds and/in the earliest (surviving) "canonical" Roman elegists, Propertius and Tibullus, whose poetry centers conceptualizing and communicating the pains of both their (fictionalized) love affairs and Roman social de-and-reconstruction. The payoffs of this project concern both literary history and contemporary scholarly practice. This study situates the emergence of a Roman poetry of pain by highlighting its engagement with models such as Mimnermus, Lucretius, and funerary epitaphs, places it within its postwar context, and then tracks the afterlife of ideas about pain in elegy both in antiquity and with modern authors. For scholars of ancient literature more broadly, this project examines the potential and limitations of using different theories of trauma (social, literary, medical) in thinking about ancient ideas of non-physical wounds. The second monograph is a study of postcolonial theorist, poet, and first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor's thinking about antiquity. Before becoming a politician, Senghor was an active classicist and his ethnologically-inflected theories of a Black antiquity had a large impact on his scholarly and poetic works in addition to his policies. This project reconstructs Senghor's ethnological-philological-ancient historical method, unpacking Senghor's poetry (both his French and understudied Latin verses), theoretical writings, and political projects to tell the story of Senghor's going to antiquity in an attempt to rediscover the essential nature of the Black man in (what he viewed as) a time before racialized slavery, color discrimination, and an essentially white-European colonialism. It also recovers his attempts to use eugenics to engineer an "African Athens" in Dakar. Other interests include ancient declamation and epistolography, the rhetoric of threats and the communication of credentials/expertise, as well as the history of sexuality and the body. --- Attachments- [ picture\_as\_pdf Bryant CV (Fall 2025).pdf ](/sites/g/files/omnuum12196/files/2025-10/Bryant%20CV%20%28Fall%202025%29.pdf) --- - ## By Term [2025-28](/term/2025-28)